I'm an expert in business growth and overcoming organizational obstacles to success and a public speaker at conferences and management meetings on how to grow your organization. I'm a workshop leader for companies wanting to find their next growth engine, an author of "Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition" (Financial Times Press), a contributing editor for "International Journal of Innovation Science" and a leadership columnist for CIOMagazine and ComputerWorld. I am a former head of business development for Pepsico and Dupont, consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and am currently Managing Partner for Spark Partners. Harvard MBA. Hail from Chicago.

Don't Leave Obamacare to the Courts

Health care costs as a percent of GDP for OECD countries vs year (along with US presidencies). Health care costs increase dramatically during republican administrations at least since Nixon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No businessperson thinks the way to solve a business problem is via the courts. And no issue is larger for American business than health care. Despite all the hoopla over the Supreme Court reviews this week, this is a lousy way for America to address an extremely critical economic problem.

The growth of America’s economy, and its global competitiveness, has a lot riding on health care costs. Looking at the table, below, it is clear that the U.S. is doing a lousy job at managing what is the fastest growing cost in business (data summarized from 24/7 Wall Street.)

While America is spending about $8,000 per person, the next 9 countries (in per person cost) all are grouped in roughly the $4,000-$5,000 range — so America is 67-100% more costly than competitors. This affects everything America sells – from tractors to software services – forcing higher prices, or lower margins. And lower margins means less resources for investing in growth!

Want to know the biggest negative to jobs growth – just look at health care costs!

American health care is limiting the country’s overall economic growth capability by consuming dramatically more resources than its competition. Where America spends 17.4% of GDP (gross domestic product) on health care, competitors are generally spending only 11-12% of their resources. This means America is “taxing” itself an extra 50% for the same services as its competitive countries. And without demonstrably superior results. That is money which Americans would gain more benefit if spent on infrastructure, R&D, new product development or even global selling!

America needs to disrupt its approach to health care services

Americans seem to be fixated on the past. How they obtained health care services 50 years ago, and the role of insurance 50 years ago. Looking forward, health care is nothing like it was in 1960. The days of “Dr. Welby, MD” serving a patient’s needs are long gone. Now it takes teams of physicians, technicians, nurses, diagnosticians, laboratory analysts and buildings full of equipment to care for patients. And that means America needs a medical delivery system that allows the best use of these resources efficiently and effectively if its citizens are going to be healthier, and move into the life expectancies of competitive countries.

America must learn from its competition, not ignore them

Unfortunately, America seems unwilling to look at its competitors to learn from what they do in order to be more effective. It would seem obvious that policy makers and those delivering health care could all look at the processes in these other 9 countries and ask “what are they doing, how do they do it, and across all 9 what can we see are the best practices?”

By studying the competition America could easily learn not only what is being done better, but how it could improve on those practices to be a world leader (which, clearly, now it is not.) Yet, for the most part those involved in the debate seem adamant to ignore the competition – as if they don’t matter. Even though the cost of such blindness is enormous.

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